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Category: almost there

I took a weekend off from my studies, as I was fluey and unable to concentrate on anything. By Sunday, I felt an old familiar tug, pulling me to Doorways.

Even though I’d already been waking up early every morning, by two o’clock I felt as if I’d go mad if I didn’t just look at what I still needed to do. Looking turned into revision of one part, which turned into eight almost straight hours of it.

By 10 PM I’d reached the end. Yay me!

I’m still not quite done, though, because I need to go over it one more time before sending it to my first Crit Partner. I have a sneaking suspicion that there are some bits toward the end that will need a lot more work, because my germ ridden mind can only focus for so long. The only reason why I kept going was because I was going into the story’s climax. It kept feeling wrong to stop.

I really want to get to the end, though. I’d rewritten the close to one I really loved, but as I woke up I got this niggling suspicion that became an all consuming thought: It didn’t fit the story. It would have been gorgeous if it had, but the entire story sets the characters up in a certain way. One that clashed with the ending I’d written. Sigh…

So now I’m still trying to work out how to close Doorways that makes everyone happy while bringing the point across that this wouldn’t be the end…

Anyone else writing writing a series? How did you manage to end the book without ending the story?

Well, I can’t say today’s writing went badly. I wrote almost 3000 words in the end.

My heart wants to go on, because I am this *pinches index finger to thumb* close to an important event in the story. As in, it should happen in the next scene.

But, something bad is going on. My heart also wants to rush to the event, brushing past everything that still has to happen before the event can take place.

So, I’ve let my brain pull the brakes for today.

Someone once blogged about the fact that the rush was getting to him. That he had to fight the rush in order to let the end of the story do the rest of it justice.

I have to admit that I used to think that he was over-reacting (if you’re here, guy who wrote about this, I’m sorry), but I’ve started to feel the stirrings. That knowledge that I am the closest I’ve ever been to a real completed novel.

I say this, because I’m over half way now at 46k words. The Doorways rough draft was only 42k words.

So, yeah, completing this rewrite is going to be a major accomplishment. And I want to have been there yesterday.

Because of that, story elements might get lost. Because I will get ideas for subplots that I should add in (i.e. more scenes from Darrion, Gawain and Ward’s view point.) If I leave those scenes for the edits, I’m almost guaranteed to forget them. And they’re important, not so much to only the story, but they set up the next three books.

So I can’t just leave them alone and rush to the end. After all this time of fighting to keep all the strings in hand, I can’t afford to slack off on them now. I can’t sell out on myself now, when things are picking up and racing to the end.

I need to keep control over the Beast.

So… have you ever gotten to the second half of the story and felt the urge to rush to the end? Did you? Did you regret it? Or did you get stuck in the middle? (I hear that’s a common affliction among writers.) How did you get out of it?